After it was released in Japan in 1996, Pokemon Red did okay for a game of its type; however Nintendo had no idea that the game still live through Internet nearly 20 years later. Hosted on the streaming service video game Twitch, a version of the game Pokemon Red and Blue unleashed the passions of gamers since its launch on February 12 and set records of popularity.

The peculiarity of this part of Pokemon play is that thousands of gamers connected simultaneously–using Twitch’s video streaming and chat service to control characters as a crowd. The game took 16 days to complete with more than one million players participating the online social experiment. The absurdities of a crowd controlling a single character in a video game made for some interesting pitfalls and zany issues–but the crowd still managed to make it through the entire game.

For those who have not heard of the phenomenon, this unique Twitch plays Pokemon event was launched on 12 February. The idea was to gather a maximum of players sitting behind a massive game where everyone could run a command through the chat. Indeed, the Australian genius behind this initiative has scheduled several scripts to retrieve and filter the comments of players to interpret commands, which are executed with more or less latency to a computer that hosts the famous game of Pokémon Red.

Through the use of an IRC chat bot set up by the channel creator, tens of thousands of players have been typing in commands into the Twitch stream’s comment box in an effort to control the main character on an emulated version of the game.

The craze was such that not less than 120,000 players participated until the end of the game, which is to defeat the Indigo League and become a Pokemon Master. Players use Twitch’s chat function to type in one of the original game’s eight commands–up, down, left, right, A, B, start or select–to move the main character in the game. More than 122 million chat messages were entered during the 16 days the game was active, according to figures released by Twitch. The players arrived at the end of the game after 16 days, 7 hours, 45 minutes and 29 seconds.

Social experience

What is fascinating about this game is obviously its collaborative application. Except that controlled by thousands of players at once, the main character, Red, operated mostly as disordered actions, if not totally absurd-looking progress. After four days of play, participants captured, by accident, their first and essential Pokémon, a Charmeleon level 34. Very simple actions like cutting a tree, taking a turn or climbing the steps of a staircase proved nearly insurmountable difficulties. There were sometimes dozens of hours of play necessary for participants to overcome a table, such as the casino in Pokemon Tower Lavender Town.

Many obstacles were systematically thwarted by the participants, who developed a cult following around this “social experiment”, as the Australian designer describes. Played around the world, the phenomenon has generated tons of memes, retracing most of the key elements of the game. This social experiment unprecedented took so widespread that participants have created a new religion around the game, based on unpredictable events generated by online anarchy.

Despite hazardous commands, players still managed to catch the legendary bird Elector. The output of the commands can be disastrous, since in the logbook include the “Bloody Sunday”, where players flying the trainer Red has released no less than twelve Pokemon.

Next big adventure

Games are often about competition, but Twitch Plays Pokémon showed that cooperation on a massive scale was both fun and, eventually, still able to produce results.

“Twitch Plays Pokémon has been an incredible experience, and we look forward to the next big adventure with all of you,” wrote Twitch PR director Chase, in a company blog post.

One new adventure has already begun. The anonymous programmer who created Twitch Plays Pokemon has already launched a sequel, a play-through of Pokemon Crystal, released in 2001. The next chapter for Twitch Plays type games may also be on the PlayStation 4: The upcoming horror game Daylight may play with the formula, according to the Twitch blog.

Twitch Plays Pokemon landmark in the world of video games, and even the internet. The appropriation of such a license by an anonymous Australian player, apparently without any control from the parent company Nintendo, is a success. The curious can follow the game on the twitch channel, the Reddit live thread, or using a new chrome extension.